No Means No

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Julian Assange’s defiant address from the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy on
Sunday had a notable omission: his reason for being there. The founder of
WikiLeaks had sought political asylum not, as he insinuated, from “the US
Administration’s war on whistleblowers”, but because he preferred to jump
bail rather than answer allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Mr Assange has previously protested his innocence of those accusations. The
invisibility, within the picture of oppression that he described, of the two
women who have brought the complaints does, however, conform to assumptions
that still pervade public discourse on the broader issue